Chapter 381: Table Gathering

The VIP section of the Crimson Eden Noire wasn’t a room.

It was a cathedral of sin purpose-built for people who’d forgotten what money even tasted like.

Three crescent tiers of black leather booths rising like dark altars around a private dance floor nobody was using—because the people in this room didn’t dance.

They

held court

.

Obsidian tables veined with pulsing crimson crystal caught the bass bleeding through the walls and threw it back in slow, hypnotic throbs. The bar ran the entire back wall—four bartenders moving like synchronized assassins, paid so much they never held eye contact longer than two seconds and never asked your name.

Ceiling mirrored, naturally, fracturing crimson light into a thousand sharp, decadent shards that turned every movement into a fever dream painted by someone with exquisite taste and zero conscience.

Emily had outdone herself.

Phei sat dead centre in the king’s booth—the one with the best

sightlines,

deepest leather, most space, positioned so anyone stepping into the VIP would see

him

first.

Whether that was Emily’s doing or the club’s default setting for whoever dropped the

fattest stack

, Phei didn’t know and didn’t care.

The

Cucklord Stole

lay draped around his neck like it had always belonged here—crimson fabric drinking the club’s red glow, making it look like it had been woven from the same shadows and bad decisions that built this place.

The shifting draconic patterns moved lazy and obscene across the threads: bodies arching, female curves dissolving and reforming just beyond the edge of conscious recognition.

Every girl in the VIP section leaned a fraction closer when he spoke. Laughed harder at jokes that weren’t even that funny. Found excuses to brush his arm, his shoulder, the back of his hand.

Landon and Brian were there.

David though had turned the booth directly behind them into a live-stream war room—phone propped against a magnum of Dom Pérignon, narrating into the lens with the manic glee of a boy who’d been born to chronicle apocalypse and had finally found one worth filming.

"—and that’s Landon, ladies and gentlemen, the man who set the screen that freed Phei for the poster dunk, currently drinking what I’m

reliably informed

is a

three-thousand-dollar

bottle of champagne like it’s tap water, and if that’s not the most

baller

shit you’ve seen all week—"

"David," Landon said without looking up from his glass, "if you point that camera at me one more time, I’m going to shove it somewhere even your subscribers won’t

recognise."

"Threats only make me hornier. Keep going."

The Simps had claimed the remaining booths like a small, glittering army—twenty-something girls, all glowing with the specific, delirious high that came from winning money you’d

earned

yourself and then spending the night orbiting the boy your hindbrain had already crowned king.

The Dominance Aura rolled through the section in lazy, syrup-thick waves—Phei had it reined in, controlled, not blasting like earlier, but in a closed space like this it pooled and thickened anyway.

The girls didn’t know why their skin felt fever-hot.

Why their cheeks were flushed before the Cristal touched their lips. Why every time Phei shifted in his seat or turned his head, fifteen sets of eyes tracked him like flowers tracking the sun.

They just knew they wanted to be here.

More than anywhere else on earth.

Brian raised his glass—something amber and stupidly expensive. "To the man who walked on air."

Landon lifted his. "To the man who made richer."

David thrust his free hand skyward, champagne sloshing. "To the man who made Marcus Heavenchild look like he’d never touched a basketball in his perfectly-sculpted, trust-fund life!"

The Simps detonated—glasses raised, voices crashing into a wall of noise that was half-toast, half-war cry. The sound bounced off the mirrored ceiling and came back twice as loud, twice as feral.

Phei lifted his glass.

Coco-Cala. (not a mistake guys)

Ice. Fizz. Zero alcohol. Not one drop.

Nobody blinked. Nobody questioned it. The atmosphere was already intoxicating enough; the bass in the walls was enough; the raw, stupid, human warmth spreading through his chest—nothing to do with Void-Ice, everything to do with sitting in a room full of people who

saw

him and

liked

what they saw and had bet their money and their reputations on it—was enough.

He drank his soda and felt something he couldn’t quite name.

Not happiness. That word was too tidy. Happiness was pocket change. This was bigger, messier, bloodier.

This was a boy who’d spent ten years as a ghost finally sitting where people looked at him—and wanted to keep looking—and had risked everything to prove it.

If this was what normal teenagers felt at parties, then yeah—he got why they kept coming back.

Emily materialised at his elbow—like she’d been standing there the whole time and he’d just failed to notice.

Another Simp trailed her: brunette, carrying two bottles of something French that cost more than most cars.

"More

Cristal,"

Emily announced, setting the bottles down with the crisp efficiency of a

quartermaster

resupplying a battlefield. "And a Château Margaux because

someone

"—she shot David a look that could’ve stripped paint—"told the bartender we were celebrating a ’

historic military victory’

and they upgraded us."

"It

was

a historic military victory," David said, not looking up from his phone. "Three versus five. That’s Thermopylae energy with better haircuts. I will

not

be corrected."

Emily turned back to Phei.

And froze mid-step.

Something in her face flickered—subtle. She wasn’t looking

into

his eyes. She was studying

them

. Cataloguing the thaw like a scientist watching ice retreat from a coastline she’d thought

permanent.

The Ice Prince coldness had receded. Not gone—

never fully gone, maybe

—but cracked. Fractured at the edges.

Letting something warmer bleed through. Something that looked suspiciously like the bruised, quiet boy who’d once handed her a tissue to in a hallway when the whole world was still trying to pretend she didn’t exist.

Emily’s mouth curved. Small. Private. A smile meant for him alone.

"You look better," she said, voice soft enough that the bass almost swallowed it.

Phei arched one brow. "Than what?"

"Than

before

." She didn’t elaborate.

She set the last bottle down with her usual crisp precision and melted back into the crowd, the brunette Simp trailing her like a shadow in Louboutins.

Phei watched her go.

Cute

, he thought.

And for once he actually meant it. Not the polite version. The real one.

The table talk rolled on—Landon retelling the poster dunk like he was narrating a war crime he’d personally committed—

"I set the screen, right, and then I look up and this lunatic is

above the rim

, and I’m standing there thinking did I just assist in a felony or witness divine intervention?"— Brian dropping dry corrections —"You screamed like a girl"—

David interjecting with unasked-for colour commentary "Thermopylae with better haircuts, I’m telling you—"

—while the Simps drifted in and out like satellites, refilling glasses, brushing arms, radiating that nervous-worshipful energy of girls who’d bet their allowances on a ghost and won the lottery.

One of them—an

auburn-curled

beauty with cheekbones that could’ve sliced bread and a family crest probably older than most countries—leaned across the obsidian to snag a bottle and asked, casual as breathing:

"Where’s Delilah? And Sierra and Maddie?"

Innocent. Filler. The verbal equivalent of commenting on the weather.

But something in Phei’s eyes

changed

.

Not the Ice Prince snapping back. The opposite.

Heat

.

A dark, filthy, possessive hunger that hadn’t been there a heartbeat ago, igniting behind

amethyst

irises like someone had struck a match in dry tinder. His jaw tightened. Fingers around the Coke glass flexed—just enough that the condensation beaded faster, the ice inside cracking audibly.

The auburn girl didn’t notice. She’d already turned back to her friends, curls bouncing, question forgotten before it landed.

But Emily noticed.

Her eyes flicked to Phei’s face and clocked the shift with the cold efficiency of an assistant who’d been trained to read her boss’s micro-expressions like quarterly reports.

Hungry

,

she thought.

She assumed it was for

his

women.

She was only half right.

What none of them could see—

what none of them would ever see

—was the fairy currently throwing the most shameless,

sin-drenched

tantrum of her immortal life.

Not hovering at the table’s edge.

Not perched demurely on a champagne flute.

On the table

.

Dead centre.

Floating an inch above the obsidian, surrounded by tens of thousands of dollars in Cristal, Château Margaux, and imported everything, posed with the deliberate, theatrical depravity of a creature who knew exactly what she was doing and was

reveling

in it.

She lay on her side.

One elbow propped on empty air—because physics bent for her when she demanded it—palm

cradling her cheek

like the void itself was her personal pillow.

Body stretched in a long, obscene curve that would’ve made a Renaissance sculptor drop his chisel and a cardinal reach for holy water.

Legs extended, one draped languidly over the other at the ankle, the void-ice veil hiked so high on her thighs it was no longer clothing—it was

provocation

.

Gossamer-thin

frost-fabric so translucent in places it was less veil and more

memory

of modesty.

The ghost of restraint that had died screaming and refused to haunt politely.

****

Phei was

certain

it was deliberate.

Because from his angle—the only angle that mattered—the veil did

nothing

.

Less than nothing.

It was an act of war against the concept of

coverage.